What are we all playing this weekend?

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I cannot get over 5ive’s song Battlestar, which I heard for the first time this week. 1) Come on, it’s a banger. 2) Oh my god they reference Star Wars all the time. Sure, I may have started a post or two with an image of the wrong sci-fi series at some point in my career–entirely by accident, always, completely–but this is such a firm and confident and JOYOUS commitment to completely cacking it up that I beam every time the chorus starts. Logs show I listened to it twelve times in a row on Wednesday. I can only dream of being as great as 5ive.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

Adam:[Adam is fired.]

Alec:[Alec is also fired. Lots of jobs to fill on Monday morning.]

Alice: I didn’t finish my Bloodborne Kirkhammer run during my holiday last week, so I would like to work towards that. As much as I enjoy mashing monsters with a mallet and the all-or-nothing gamble of predicting enemy movements to wind up for big hits, Bloodborne isn’t the same without a parrying pistol.

Back on PC, I’ll have more Legendary Gary, the RPG with an RPG. Nice to have that music in my ears again, at least when I’m not looping Battlestar.

Brendan:I have arranged to render Matt braindead once again in cyberpunk card game Netrunner. He just can’t help but poke his hacker nose into my corporate vaults, the misguided young man. Let’s see, an auto-turret here, some firewalls there, a few private security guards over here. I daresay my servers are impenetr– [siren noises] No… It can’t be…

Graham: I been thinking a lot about JRPGs recently – since before this week’s podcast covered it, even. It’s a genre that sits mostly in a blindspot for me and I wonder if I’m missing out. I like the idea of big worlds to explore, with tactical combat and an entertaining band of characters by my site. I’m not excited at the thought of long grind, anime bullshit, and empty fantasy fields, however. I think I’ve therefore settled on trying Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen this weekend. It’s Japanese and an RPG, but probably not a JRPG.

John: If I get to play anything this weekend, it’ll have to be three-year-old friendly. Although recent times have offered plenty of that, with my boy loving both Subnautica and Fe. Might whirr either of those up to fill the infinite stretch of weekend hours.

Katharine: I’m being subjected to my hen party tomorrow, so my usual Sunday Xenoblade Chronicles 2 marathon is most certainly out unfortunately. I will, however, be squeezing in as much Xenoblade as I can today, and I might also start a bit of Fe to help me prepare for the horrors that await tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Matt: I’ll be sneaking around Metal Gear Survive, reluctantly crafting clean drinking water and slaughtering innocent sheep so I can get back to the surprisingly good stealth bits. Metal Gear with zombies actually works, but after playing Rust last week I’m getting pretty tired of filling thirst and hunger metres.

Endless Legend already has customizable units – you can swap out different weapons and armour and relics on the soldiers you can build as well as your heroes. Terraforming isn’t… really there, but the Shifter’s expansion does add a faction and game mechanics that revolve around surviving and even conquering the game’s winters, whilst the final expansion is water-focused, adding sea fortresses amongst other things.

I would say try Beyond Earth, but it really would need to be with the expansion Rising Ride. On it’s own, BE doesn’t really do much, but with Rising Tide, it does a respectable job. It has movable cities on the oceans, terraforming (albeit of a limited sort; not able to raise and lower the terrain sadly), and customisable units when researching certain techs or fulfilling optional quests.
I was pleasantly surprised by BE: Rising Tide. Worth a shot when they go on sale, I’d say.

Stellaris released it’s new, fantastic, 2.0 update so I’m mostly playing that. I also managed to pick up the After Dark expansion for Cities: Skylines, and I am delighted to find out that it adds bicycle lanes to the game, so I’ll be going back trough some of my older cities to fix their traffic issues via the means of universal bicycles.

There’s also lots of exciting updates coming for Rome 2: Total War, Hearts of Iron IV, and Vermintide, and the final Battlefield 1 expansion was released and it’s quite good… Definitely too much to pick from in the coming weeks, which is the best thing if you’re stuck at the parent’s home waiting for paperwork to be filled out.

Saturday will be mostly devoted to a Divinity: Original Sin co-op campaign. This is going to be our third or fourth session and we’re about to venture from the safety of Cyseal town centre. I’ve been really enjoying it and have found that the co-op works surprisingly well. It’s great that you can split up so readily, and I think this has really brought some of the role-playing aspects to the fore. My rouge buddy keep getting caught stealing, however!

I’ll also be checking out that Stellaris “Cherryh” 2.0 update. I’ve coincidentally gotten back into the game recently (a side-effect of reading Consider Phlebas) and this patch looks like it will be excellent.

Assassin’s Creed: Bath-towel. I’ve just unlocked this costume for by heck! and its probably the high-light of the game so far. Killing dudes and climbing walls, the bath-towel way. Its just a shame you can’t whip it off and strangle guys with it.

Naff Effect Andromeda trial. I’m 3 hours in the 10 hour trial and I still don’t know what to think of it. I’ve cringed at a few lines of dialogue. I’ve killed a few crab people. And I have watched those god awful facial animations to much already. I think its just going be one of those games where its neither good or bad. Just… abit naff. Should I waste my time on a 70% game where there is so much else that is better out there? That is the question.

Forza Horizon 3. Feels good bombing around in overpriced cars, having 60FPS and watching the lovely Australia whizz by.

If you’re enjoying some bits I would say stick with it. The opening is the weakest part of the game. The larger story never really comes together due to a boring central villain (evil scientist space orcs), but it has some good moments and characters, cool landscapes and the combat and exploration (driving around in the Nomad) is fun.

Just as I get “done” with PoE and my Abyss League Essence Drain Shadow Stellaris decides to release 2.0. So now im playing the Koala Borg in that. Only 10 years in and our nearest neighbour are religous fanatics whose hobbies include enslaving lesser races and cleansing the unholy mechanical menace. This is going to go well…

My (random) Stellaris empire for 2.0 is made of militaristic, fanatic spiritualist plants. Which is pretty much the polar opposite of what I am in real life (a pacifist, fanatic materialistic animal), so it’s going to be interesting to see if I can roleplay that accordingly. So far there are very few inhabitable planets around me, and no neighbors within at least a 3-system radius… other than a dormant thing that looks like a Death Star. I’m going to research it. Wish me luck.

Dragon’s Dogma is an amazing game with genius vocations system (that comes in pair with really stupid stat-increase system, sadly), but not really a thing I would recommend as a start in jRPG genre. It is a mixture of Diablo and Monster Hunter with some Skyrim on top of that.

I embarked on great journey of getting some of my mundane buddies to play Factorio – even if I have to keep nagging them for weeks until they succumb and see it’s greatness. Yesterday two of them joined the server on their own accord. Progress.

Playing Total War: Arena too. It’s hard to get trough my prejudice against Wargaming titles, so I won’t draw conclusions from the fact that I’m having nothing but fun since I started.

You know there are games that instantly look cool and flashy, even from the trailer, and you have to play 10-20 hours to realize it’s just the same old bland dull game everyone releases again and again. Factorio (and Rimworld) works exactly the opposite way.

None of them requires expertise imo. Building factories is fun and challenging, regardless of the desired efficiency and complexity. The ballads that happen to new players and experts on Rimworld mainly differ in length I’d say.

At the moment, I’m just wondering what sort of ice cream Brendan’s eating. I’m leaning toward mint chocolate chip, but the resolution is too low to discount pistachio entirely.

The Electronic Wireless Show has gotten me in the mood to play Mario RPG again, which we did indeed have in the States back in the day. Here’s a fun tidbit about it and censorship for Western audiences, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Bowser’s Middle Finger pose was changed for Western releases to be much less offensive, as this is considered a very obscene gesture in Western Territories. Also in the PAL version of Super Mario RPG the word “Bugger” said by Croco has been replaced with “Pest”

See here for a visual comparison of the first thing, but note that there’s no actual middle finger showing; he’s doing that thing where you grab your elbow pit with one hand and show someone the back of your other hand in fist form.

Gah! Right, PC games. Besides playing Mario RPG with an emulator since my SNES is in storage across the pond (lousy oceans ruining videogames), there will be the usual Lawbreakers and Devil Daggers sessions, plus, hopefully, some VR. Sprint Vector looks interesting, but I already have a backlog in VR, so that’ll have to wait, I think.

I will try to finish two games this weekend. One is Dark Fall. I started the series at last. I usually don’t get that frightened in horror games. Get excited? Yes. If it’s above average, like Dead Space, I also feel suspense. But usually, not frightened. But this games gets to me for some reason. I don’t know if it’s the sound or the fact that I still don’t know what the “dark fall” is even though I have finished 2/3 of the game.

The other game I’m trying to finish is Blade of Darkness. In fact I’ll cut me down some orks after I finish writing this. Having played it when it came out, I never got around to finish it because I bought a new system and didn’t bother to reinstall it for some reason. After buying it on GOG, didn’t jump right in either. When I was browsing through my backlog in GOG the other day, I decided to download and install it. I ran it to try it out with the newest version of the Blade of Light mod, which didn’t work again on my Win8.1 system but man I’m hooked. So I decided to play it to the end this time around. Story is meh, but combat is enjoyable even though animations and models are a bit stiff. Thankfully, there’s a lot of it.

I’m hoping to get a bit of Prison Architect in this weekend and continue expanding the max security wing of my prison whilst brutally suppressing any riots. I also really want to finish Dragon Age Inquisition but I’m stuck on a really nasty fight in the Jaws f Haakon that I’m ill prepared for.

Me too; finishing up my third (third!!) playthrough of XCOM2. Finished the ‘names of friends and family’ playthrough and got stuck in the ‘silly names’ playthrough, but just about to finish the ‘names of world leaders’ playthrough. The DLC was amazing. Can’t wait until 3, but I reckon it will be awhile.

Man, I’m the same, I don’t want to use my brain/inhabit my consciousness too much when I’m sick. I don’t know about this recommendations you mention, but last time I was really ill I went for straight nostalgia chow: Thief I, SimCity 2000, Max Payne, Morrowind – stuff I not only know by heart and which kinda operates as comfort food in any context, but which also evokes my childhood and therefore revives that sort of subdued giddiness you get when you realize, oh boy, you’re actually sick enough to stay home from school! Even if, in the real world, staying home sick is costing me a day’s pay… “whatever, for now I just need to make it back to Balmora and offload some loot…”

World Of Tanks, although I’m only playing to get the daily double xp matches out of the way and will be dropping it for a while once my current premium time has run out. The last round of buffs to Russian tech tree was the last straw.

Just finished the first episode of Orwell season two. It’s as good as last time. Which is pretty good.

Crusader Kings 2. England, Scotland, and Wales have all fallen to the might of Ireland. Now it’s time for opportunistic adventures in the Iberian peninsula while there are still some Moslems to declare holy wars on and before West Francia and Aquitaine gobble up the whole place.

Also Street Fighter. I’ve decided to make a serious effort to (at long, long last) learn to play some charge characters. Early experiments with M. Bison have gone surprisingly well.

I bought Kingdom Come just before the end of my current data allowance cycle, so I can’t install it yet. In lieu of that, and in keeping with the Eastern European theme, I’ve finally FINALLY got around to a proper playthrough of STALKER: Call of Pripyat and thoroughly enjoying myself. First hour or so is tough going, but soon enough you’re bristling with money and guns and it becomes about how far you’re willing to test your limits.

I was going to be playing Stellaris, but the 2.0 update is horrible and ruined the game. I’m very upset because I bought the game and all the DLC as it came out, so I spent a lot of money on this game and they forced an update on everyone that changes the game and makes it shit. I had nearly 200 hours in the game, and got 17 hours in trying to like the 2.0 stuff, restarting over and over as I learned new things, but I just hate it. I don’t know why the devs thought it would be a good idea to add unfun, unbalanced, irritating, and frustrating features to the game.

And I finished TNG. I was going to switch to rewatching Stargate, but I’ll just continue the series. Think the Generations movie is next. Sadly it, and all the ST movies were taken off Amazon Prime in the time it took me to watch TNG.

Finishing TNG, Stellaris becoming garbage, and my sociopath family being hateful to me has me feeling depressed and empty. I don’t even know what to play now.

I need to find a deep immersive RPG to escape myself for a while to feel better.

I highly recommend the Stargate franchise! SG-1 season 1 is a bit ropey sure, but so was TNG. It finds its feet and the characters are enjoyable. In case you’re not aware it goes Stargate (1994 film), Stargate SG-1 season 1-7, then Stargate: Atlantis (season 1-5) runs parallel to SG-1 season 8-10. The TV-movies SG-1: Ark of Truth and Continuum are both set after SG-1 season 10.

If you’re feeling down, the show is just the ticket as while the stakes are always high it’s pre grimdark sci-fi which seems to be the order of the day post-Battlestar Galactica 2003.

Also maybe start looking at Jordan Peterson lectures/12 rules for life book if you feel like your life is in a rut.

That sounds like it sucks. I’d recommend against pure escapism when faced with legitimately bad circumstances… but I’m not naive. When’s the last time you played Saints Row 4? Or Oblivion, in full embrace of its glitches and edges of jagged jank? Trying to think of games which have legitimately made me laugh out loud in my seat… oh, well Deadly Premonition maybe? Or maybe 80 Days, if travel fantasy helps?

Actually, fuck, just download Comedy Night and go tell it like it is haha. If you’re angry and desperate enough there’s just half a chance you’ll be funny too..!

Hope this doesn’t sound too glib, since I say it cus I can relate. You’ll get outta there eventually if it’s that bad, I believe that much is inexorable anyway. So look forward to that. But in the meantime, hey, if it’s any comfort, take my word for it: it could *always* be worse!

Better on Xbone anyway, especially if you have the X so textures actually load before you hit the ground and it looks nearly as good in 4K as the PC version. No cheaters, and you can blame your aiming incompetence on the controller rather than just being a bit rubbish.

After a number of hours with the new Stellaris update, it is still the same boring slog of a game that it was before. Unless you’re continually entertained by the Mad Libs qualities of the game (My plant|insect|lizard aggressive|pacifist|spirtualist empire declared war|was conquered by|vassalised ::recurse from here::), it’s inferior to any of the better space 4x games — ES2 has actual faction-based unique story elements rather than recombined and repeated RNG events, and Distant Worlds & GalCiv2|3 do the ‘traditional’ elements of the genre better. Also, with the alternatives, you don’t have to spend multiple days of your life staring at a map with the speed on fastest hoping that something new happens while crawling towards the endgame — of course with DW you make that decision for yourself.

Finished Dishonored: Death of the Outsider this week. Good stuff, the story was great and you always get high quality from Arkane, especially the world building and level design. If there’s no more Dishonored in the future then it’s a nice wrap up for the series. Having seen both endings I reckon I picked the right one.

If I had one criticism, it’d be the same one that can be leveled against all Dishonored games – that they reuse levels or bits of levels.

I quite fancy going through Dishonored 2 again now, but as Emily, or maybe playing the Dishonored DLCs again.

I was going to check out the Stellaris 2.0 patch, but after skimming the Paradox forum, I think I’ll wait a few weeks.

I don’t mind the change to hyperlane-only, but some of the changes to warfare seem like just a continuation of bad design. A European historical model of warfare and diplomacy is just a poor fit to a space 4X game. Can’t declare war on a faction because your borders don’t touch, there’s one star system between you? Really? Or a “forced peace” due to war weariness when you’re 99.5% finished with a conquest? That’s ridiculous. So I’ll wait to see if some of this gets cleaned up, or modded.

I guess I’ll be splitting time instead between Endless Space 2, Subnautica, and our continuing co-op game of Divinity OS 2.

I loved Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime with my GF, we had a great time with couch cooping that one and Overcooked, but both were simply too short, and always left us wanting more. Always looking for good fun same-screen coop games…

Continuing with “Remember Me”. And that means, play a level for the story, then go on Youtube, check out where are all the collectibles I’ve missed, and go replay it (I’m a lore junkie, and the easiest to miss collectibles are Mneist memories that fill in the backstory of Neo-Paris). Due to this, progress is a tad slower than you’d expect.

I started another Mass Effect trilogy playthrough. Oh no… With some Femshep renegade vanguard. Trying to stay on the reasonable(ish) side of renegade, like being a bit of a jerk who’s more than willing to get her hands dirty, but not full blown psycho racist. There are so many awful design issues in ME1 it’s kind of crazy it manages to rise above them and then have two great sequels. This game is the definition of jank.

Yeah going back to ME1 you really appreciate how much 2 and 3 improved, though you also appreciate the world building and characters more because you know where it’s going. I found Garrus kinda underdeveloped in 1 and Liara is entertaining but strains credibility. The music is still *so good* though and the arc of the story holds up.

I 110% Hat in Time and Snake Pass this past week, so I have been feeling the urge for a replacement 3D platformer. I went back to A Story About my Uncle and I have been doing much better at it the second time around. On the one hand, it has absolutely ridiculous jump and grappling hook mechanics that feel fantastic when they work correctly, but on the other hand the aiming is a little too precise for controller and the path forward is not always as clear as it should be. The story is also just the right level of camp for my enjoyment.

I finally finished the short and wonderful Little Nightmares on wednesday. The entire thing is a splendid little puzzle/platformer and latter 3/4 of the game is like the most nightmarish scenes of “Spirited Away” distilled into an actual nightmare. It’s just a few hours long but is great. Anyone would be pretty reasonable in comparing it to Inside or Limbo, but for it’s similarities it’s definitely it’s own beast.

I’m actually away from my PC at a Maple Syrup Festival in Southern Illinois this weekend. For folks across the pond this entails exhibitions in the woods of the entire syrup making process from tree tapping to sap evaporation in an outdoor stove and other assorted old-timey country living activies as well- blacksmithing demos, flint knapping, and lumberjack demonstrations… (Chop logs! Throw logs! Saw Logs! Beards!) Apart from this my weekend has a 6hr train ride yet so i’ll be playing my Train Ride staple: Hundred Rabbits dungeon crawling solitare game DONSOL on the phone.

Mount & Blade: Warband. Damn thing sucked me back in one more time. It might be 70% moving from town to town without doing very much, slowly grinding my soldiers and my levels, 20% pretty fun tournaments and smashing endless groups of bandits, but that other 10%…

I booted it up on a whim the other day, intending to just spend a few minutes messing around. An hour later, there I was, on the walls of my castle, 123 good and loyal soldiers at my back. Soldiers I’ve fought with for hours, hardened veterans easily worth 5 of any enemy soldier they cared to throw at me. Unfortunately we weren’t just outnumbered 5 to 1. On the other side of the walls, 800 enemy soldiers. From two different enemy factions, including legendary archers who can decimate opposing forces and close combat masters who are next to unkillable in hand to hand fights. They wanted my castle. I wanted my castle. And then the chaos started.

I don’t know how long it was, how many soldiers I killed, how many heroics the swordsmen at the wall pulled. I put bolt after bolt through enemy helmet, reloading from each of my sharpshooters who’d been a little too greedy and had picked up an arrow for their trouble. The final body fell, I loosed my final bolt, the dust cleared, and… we’d won. We’d overcome the odds, repelled a far superior enemy force just long enough for the cavalry to come riding over the horizon. They mopped up the remnants, while I tried to stop shaking. That, right then, right there, that’s why I play this game.

played Cipher for a while yesterday because i love the developer’s other work; but i have to say i found it pretty disappointing. tbh, i couldn’t really tell why it was published as a game at all, rather than just as a workbook accompanying a cryptography primer.

so i suppose it’s a bit ironic that i’ll spend the remaining portion of my gaming weekend reading a VN or two — chiefly, Steins;Gate 0 so i can finish it before the anime adaptation comes out.

Picked up Titanfall 2 for 5 bucks on that Amazon sale because the single-player was well-received. I’ve only played briefly but am pleased to see what looks like a quality production.

Plus who doesn’t like a good buddy flick between a guy and his murderous robot buddy? Persona 5 is on the back burner but I very much enjoyed a cat’s view of transportation. Had to put The Surge down, so much grindage it feels like and finally beat Rom the Vacous Spider.

Picked up Bomber Crew on sale at HB a couple weeks ago, so I decided to try it out. I am now hooked. It has everything I loved about FTL and more, and I think it’ll be taking up most of my game time this weekend.

Also from HB (curse you, cheap deals!) I got DS3 and have been trying to defeat the first boss, playing as the mercenary class. Looking at gameplay videos of it, seems like I just need to git gud.

I can’t tell if it’s s typo or not, but the way Graham says, “I been thinking about JRPGs lately” just makes me picture a ten year old boy in a baseball cap from like a Life cereal commercial or something, putting his chin in his hand and saying, with a whistle where he lost his front tooth, “Yknow, I been thinkin’..! Thinkin’ bout jay-are-peejees…” and the mental image is so strong that it just keeps cracking me up haha. This is like the third time it just got me.

I realize the uncontrollable nature of this is part of hebephrenia but I do not mind at all haha, I mean I might as well get some laughs out of the deal